Based on what people told us we came up with a list of furniture to take with us. The advice that we got was along the following lines -
- There is less variety and thereby less choice for furniture in india. The stuff that you get from a furniture shop is not of solid wood and hence not good quality. The good quality furniture is much more expensive (than in US). So unless you plan to call a carpenter, babysit him and have him custom make your furniture, you are better off getting stuff from US (provided ofcourse you have space in container).
- Rooms and houses in India tend to have less space. So get furniture from US taking that into account. Basically get smaller and slimmer furniture. We were told that there have been cases in rental houses where big furniture has not been able to pass through the doorway and hence had to stay in storage. Now that I have looked at various "luxury" rental homes, I can definitely vouch for this advise. I am hoping that our furniture will fit in the house and wont look too imposing. I cannot emphasize this enuf - the rooms and houses are really small, so choose your furniture appropriately.
- Memory foam mattresses : Get from US since you don't get them easily in India. For Redmond folks, I would highly recommend "6 day" mattress store that is next to the Subway on Cleveland St. don't go by its appearance (very shady). Its a mom and pop shop, has great reviews, honest owner, good variety and great prices. So don't even think of going to the branded stores.
- Kids furniture : Get from US since a lot of pottery barn kind of stuff is not available in india.
- Beddings : Get from US since you don't get good quality cotton sheets (higher thread count) in india. Arti had read somewhere that the max thread count in india is around 150 (pathetic).
This was also a good time to recycle some of our furniture that we had for 7 yrs. So heeding to the sound advice, the next step was furniture shopping. I did the rounds for 3-4 furniture shops to scout for items that would work for us and that I liked. Then in the next trip Arti joined me to look at just the selected items. Since Arti was working and was also dealing with HR and a bunch of people associated with the move, her time was very valuable. We had to do furniture shopping early since it takes about 8 weeks to custom order something. Turned out that we couldn't custom order anything since the timings didn't match. So we had to do with the instore selections. Takeaway here is that if you are planning a move and have a container to ship then get most of furniture from US and give yourself more than 2 months to get custom ordered stuff. Finally after too many (to my liking) furniture store trips we bought majority of the things that we wanted to buy and had then scheduled for delivery in mid-aug. This was in early to mid july. The next step was to make space for the new furniture. I then created a list of items that we wanted to sell and put them on craiglist. This was a work in progress for several weeks and was very time consuming. A lot of time was spent responding to folks, fixing time to have then over, showing them stuff, dealing with bargaining, dealing with people dropping the ball at the last minute, etc. The items also took a long time to sell. We had about 5-6 big ticketed items (furniture) and 50+ small items. There was ample interest for the smaller items but the bigger items were harder to sell even after a number of price reductions. Also I had to deal with scamsters on craiglist. The way it works is that someone expresses interest in your items (mostly for a big ticketed item). After a few initial mail exchanges they say that they are satisfied with the quality of the item (without ever looking at it) and would like to purchase it. However they mention that they stay outside of your state and so would have a shipping company pick the items up. They then initiate a transaction for the sale price + shipping cost (around $200) and send a (fake) payment notification from paypal like gateway (fake address with paypal in the name). The notification says that the sellar should pay the shipping company the shipping cost. Once the shipping company notifies them, the payment maid by hte buyer will be released to the sellar. Till then the payment is in a frozen state. All this is fake with the intention of getting $200 from you. It is fairly well documented on craiglist but having to go through it the 1st time was quite an experience. After selling so many items on craiglist, i feel that i have become an expert on how to post an ad and give the initial responses to maximize the changes of closing the deal. However i really hated the whole process as i hate bargaining from the bottom of my heart. The only good part was the variety of people and experiences you encounter. Some the sales were very smooth. They would agree to buy stuff based on the craiglist ad photos and the asking price, setup a time and come prepared to pick it up (big pickup truck with some muscular guy(s)). Most of the transactions would be in cash payment. So at one point I had more than $2000 in cash at home. I have never had so much green physically with me before. Then there were others, who would bargain even for $3, not show up at the allocated time, drop the ball at the last minute after expressing strong interest over multiple emails. However almost all the people were very curteous in their interactions. This was slightly surprising given the amount of bargain hunters on craiglist. Thats a big difference between US and India. Imagine having to sell so many things in India and dealing with all the people and bargaining. Anyway we ended up selling most of the items that we had planned on selling. The last of our big furniture went the day the movers arrived. We either gave off or donated the remaining items. The last one week was a huuuuuuuuge slog. However that deserves its own post. More on that later.....
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